Landsat Science Team member works to improve snow tracking for water managers

Snow covers more than one-third of the Earth's land surface seasonally and is a key water source for more than 1.2 billion people across the globe, according to the US Geological Survey. As significant as it is to the world's water supply, snow is also one of the most difficult elements to monitor with remote sensing due to its brightness, challenging terrain, ever-changing nature and depth, along with cloud cover and topography.

One member of the 2026-2030 Landsat Science Team, Edward 'Ned' Bair, a scientist at Leidos and researcher with the University of California, Santa Barbara, is hoping to improve Landsat's ability to track snow to better inform water managers. He will contribute work including the Snow Property Inversion for Remote Sensing, an open-source validated approach to snow mapping that estimates snow grain size and concentrations of light absorbing particles.

Bair's proposal calls for a designated snow ground validation site for Landsat on Mammoth Mountain in California. The site, named The Jeff Dozier Snow Study Site, is situated at 9,633 feet and is described as the most advanced snow energy balance site in the world. The inclusion of this site as a designated long-term ground-validation site will enable Landsat snow products to be systematically evaluated in a more complex environment.

Water managers depend on snow cover products and need Landsat to do things like proper snow cloud discrimination. The surface reflectance that goes into the snow cover products is very important. All of this leads to actionable water management decisions, from large to small operations, Bair said.

Bair hopes that when Landsat 10 launches, no earlier than 2031, with 26 spectral bands including new bands designed for snow and ice observation, it will improve the remote sensing community's ability to track snow. A 2018 Decadal Survey by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said tracking snow accumulation, melt and sublimation was one of the most important priorities.